Unlike Mario Batali or Gordon Ramsay, you may not know the name Pino Luongo. Yet the Italian-born chef was synonymous with the high-powered New York dining scene of the ’80s and ’90s, his hot temper and even hotter restaurants providing endless grist for the city’s gossip mill before the deadly combination of hubris, business miscalculations and 9/11 caused his inevitable flame-out.
In “Dirty Dishes,” Luongo recounts his rise and fall as a New York restaurateur – a profession not of college grads but immigrant strivers: “You climbed in New York. You climbed, and at the top of everything, there was money, power, sex, theater, art. Everything you could dream of, or at least everything that I dreamed of.” Luongo gets his first taste of this world working as a busboy in the early ’80s at celebrity canteen Da Silvano, and it is here that Luongo, who trained as an actor back in Rome, discovers the “comfort and similarities between the restaurant and theater.”
“Something of a peacock” and “almost pathologically eager to please,” proprietor Silvano Marchetto waltzes into Da Silvano “drinking before lunchtime” and “performing eccentric bits of business.” Soon, Luongo is promoted to manager, hanging out and drinking with Marchetto from morning until sunrise. The restaurant’s “anything-goes” vibe is typified by a story about John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands: “One night they got so drunk that Cassavetes began challenging Gena that she couldn’t stand up. She went him one better, removing her shoes, stepping up onto the table, and performing an improvised flamenco dance to the applause of me and the few lingering customers.”
The ever-restless Luongo eventually walks out of Da Silvano – sparking an infamous rift with Marchetto – but not before “pilfering every last detail.” He opens Il Cantinori in 1983, introducing New Yorkers to authentic Tuscan cooking at a time when the city was swimming in garlicky Mama Leone-style fare, and though New Yorkers don’t quite know what to make of it, a two-star Times review soon changes all that. “Within weeks, all those great people I had met at Da Silvano found their way to our door.” Those include Keith Haring, who rides a Vespa into the restaurant as a birthday present for Vogue fashion editor Elizabeth Saltzman, and Wall Street scammer Ivan Boesky, who blows cigar smoke at a pregnant customer, causing her to scream, “I hope you go to f-ing jail!”
Boldfaced names from the worlds of art, fashion and finance would follow Luongo to Sapore di Mare in the Hamptons and then to Le Madri and Coco Pazzo in New York. A clueless hostess denies Jackie O a dinner reservation after she pedals up to Sapore di Mare on a bike. Ralph Lauren gamely dons a pair of black-and-white checkered chef pants after the maitre d’ informs him of a no-shorts rule. And then there are the “incompetent, spoiled” spawn of two regulars “too ridiculously affluent and influential to name” who get summer jobs at Sapore di Mare and think it’s OK to drink at the bar on their break.
But beyond the stars and the “bored” critics “more concerned with incidental details like what the people at the next table are wearing,” the most vividly etched character in the book is the grungy New York of the ’80s, a place where nouvelle cuisine and crime rules. Luongo helps change that apocalyptic landscape, kick-starting not only the vogue for authentic, regional Italian cooking but the era of the emperor chef. He is addicted to the “irreplaceable intensity of opening a new and preferably bigger restaurant” and can’t say no to a national expansion of the Coco Pazzo brand that ultimately leads to the emptying of his restaurant portfolio until it contains only Centolire on the Upper East Side.
Like celebrity, success in the restaurant world is fleeting. After 9/11 devastates the city’s dining scene, a group of prominent restaurateurs meet to strategize. Luongo wistfully notes that “for all of our combined influence in the restaurant world, for all of our friends in high places, at the end of the day we were what we had always been, since our days as busboys and waiters: people who served food.”
Dirty Dishes
A Restaurateur’s Story of Passion, Pain and Pasta
by Pino Luongo and Andrew Friedman
Bloomsbury